China blocking FeedBurner RSS feeds?

In recent months I had started to warm to the FeedBurner.com model, reading today on Steve Rubels weblog, I see that China was blocking feedburner feeds this troubles me greatly. It brings home the point that I’ve been making for a very long time that bloggers and podcasters must protect their RSS feeds to not do so is foolish.

When I say protecting their RSS feed, I mean, their RSS feed should reside on and reflect from the domain from which their blog is hosted on. At the very least, make sure that your RSS feed on FeedBurner is mapped to your domain through one of the feedburner advance services.

Although there is some indication that the blocking may have only been temporary, it brings up the point. What would have happen if the feeds would have been blocked permanently. this would have resulted in tens of thousands of blogs and podcasts not being accessible from China. For many people, it probably would not have been a big deal, but for others I am sure it would have caused some concerns and raise some eyebrows.

Today 99% of all blogging applications are capable of creating a valid RSS feed but at the same time, 99% of those applications are not capable of giving good statistics to the blogger. It is understandable why some would want to continue to use feedburner. But in the long run, I think it is safer for people’s brands, listenership, and readership to make sure that we do everything possible to protect ones RSS feed.

So the thing you must consider as a content producer, can you afford to have all of the Chinese population blocked from being able to access your RSS feed that resides on feedburner when in fact, your domain and home site master RSS feed is still accessible?

I wish everyone good luck and hope that hundreds of thousands of FeedBurner RSS feeds remain accessible to the Chinese people. [www.micropersuasion.com]